Attacks on computer infrastructures are a serious problem, one that has grown directly in proportion to the growth of the Internet itself. Most deployed computer systems are vulnerable to attack. The field of remediation addresses such vulnerabilities and should be understood as including the taking of deliberate precautionary measures to improve the reliability, availability, and survivability of computer-based assets and/or infrastructures, particularly with regard to specific known vulnerabilities and threats.
Too often, remediation is underestimated as merely the taking of security precautions across a network. While remediation includes such taking of security precautions, it is more comprehensive. It is more accurate to view the taking of security precautions as a subset of remediation.
The taking of precautions can be based upon policies. Such policies are typically based upon security best practices, e.g., a user shall not install his own software, and/or corporate best practices, e.g., a password must be 8 characters in length. To the extent that taking of precautions is automated, the automation typically includes sampling the value of one or more parameters of a host-entity at a given point in time. Then the sampled parameter values are presented to a user to assess whether the sampled values pose a cause for concern in the context of any policies which are in place. Typically, such evaluation by the user takes place at a location remote with respect to the host-entity.
One or more survey-tools on the host-entity sample the parameters to produce survey data which will be evaluated according to the policies. Such survey data typically exhibits a variety of formats that are foreign to formats desired by the user. Accordingly, the survey-tools, or a transformation tool on the host-entity, convert the survey data from the foreign formats of the survey-tool into the desired formats before transmitting the data to the remote location of the user.